


Death, Disgrace, and the Duchess

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: 13th Century CE RPF, 16th Century CE RPF, 17th Century CE RPF, King John - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: Actors, Child Death, Gen, POV Female Character, POV Multiple, POV Third Person, Political Alliances, Theatre, medieval politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27976593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: The requester asked for "Breton shenanigans" featuring Constance and multiple time periods. This is what I came up with. The title plays on the motto of the Duchy of Brittany, "Potius mori quam foedari."
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5
Collections: Histories Ficathon XI





	Death, Disgrace, and the Duchess

**Author's Note:**

  * For [themummersfolly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themummersfolly/gifts).



Constance has never thought very highly of the men in her life. She has also never trusted the Plantagenets. Both things, she thinks grimly, have spared her disappointments.

Her husband Geoffrey, for a start, had never been quite as clever as he thought himself. And getting killed in a tournament…! Sometimes, Constance is angry about that, about the stupid pointless waste of it. And Geoffrey had been no worshiper of chivalry. Sometimes she thinks that Geoffrey himself — who had fewer ideals than his older brother, and more of a sense of humor than his younger one — would have seen the irony in it as well. 

Geoffrey had left her pregnant. They had succeeded in that, at least. And she had borne him a son, and she had named him Arthur. Oh yes, even then she had seen the possibilities. Richard made sport of defying God, the Devil, and the Commandments, and while Constance liked him, she was under no illusions about him. Richard died as flamboyantly as he had lived, and he died without a direct heir. Which left only petty, perfidious John… and Arthur.

Constance knows that the learned men in their Latin chronicles mock at the credulity of the Bretons. In the courts of the Plantagenets, it is something of a joke: “You might as well wait for King Arthur with the Bretons…” as wait for Guillaume to pay his debts, or Jeanne to loosen her girdle. But Constance also knows her people, and she knows her power. She knows, too, that the lords of the land have no love for John. Few people have any love for John. She thinks, sometimes, that he cultivates this, in order to have the pleasure of taking offense at it. But she knows for a certainty that John is vengeful, and resentful, and utterly untrustworthy.

Yes, Constance knows better than to trust the Plantagenets, of whom her boy is one. She means to make him king in spite of them. It will be a good jest, she thinks. A jest against those Plantagenets who make so bold in their claiming of lands and women, that a son of her body might take their throne. It will also be a hard war, even with the Duke of Anjou on her side; she knows this too. But she has never minded a good fight, and she knows how to fight with words as well as weapons. It is this, Constance thinks, that endeared her to poor Geoffrey. 

Constance reflects wryly that her husband and his brother are unlikely in the extreme to be in heaven, enjoying the presence of the Lord and his saints. But perhaps, from somewhere in Purgatory, they will find the humor in the jest. She can imagine Richard fuming in his impatience to direct battles, Geoffrey delighted by John’s discomfiture. Constance shakes herself. It is time to turn from the dead to the living. She has a war to fight, on behalf of the son whom she has named for the once and future king.

* * *

Ned Hawkins regards himself in the glass. His lean, brown face is incongruously framed by a wimple. An odd play this, he thinks, that they will play for the Mayor of Rye tonight. For one thing, Sam, whose full lips and rose-pink cheeks might be the envy of many a maiden, gets to be a boy for once. And there are no young lovers for the audience to sympathize with or weep over… just a rather pallid princess and her rather pathetic groom. Instead, he himself gets the tragic speeches, as the widowed duchess and would-be matriarch of a dynasty. Ned paints his face thoughtfully. Yes, a strange play, this. It is so full of deceit, and cruelty, and betrayal, that mercy itself comes as a surprise, something too good to be true. And startling as it is, it’s not enough to save poor Sam, who plays his — Constance’s — son. Ned does enjoy playing Constance. She makes a change from philosophers and fools, and can be as sharp-tongued as both.

He is not at all sure that she ever goes mad. At least, no more than any parent, bereft of a child, might be said to go mad with grief. He had asked Will about the playing of it.

At the start of rehearsals, it had felt like a false speech — too definite, on the one hand, and too extravagant, on the other. “I will not keep this form upon my head,” declared Ned, trying it out, “when there is such disorder in my wit.” He frowned down at his pages. “Is she mad?” Sometimes, one got the best answers from the company’s affable, inscrutable playwright when one surprised him. But Will had only asked him what he thought, and Ned had remembered the company murmurs about the son dead in the summer fevers.

“Damn you for a mad bastard yourself,” he had said, with forced cheerfulness, and Will had grinned a feral grin, and that had been that. So Ned plays Constance as a woman half-mad — half-mad with grief, and anger, and absence. And not a performance goes by but he is conscious of the playwright’s eyes on him.

* * *

Elizabeth knows that she is “the famous Mrs. Barry.” The infamous Mrs. Barry, she thinks, might be nearer the mark. It would be, of a certainty, nearer to how some of the men think of her, who come to peer and chatter and applaud, who talk of her at their supper parties, who assess how moving her expressions are, how perfect her passions upon the stage.

Elizabeth makes a face at herself in the glass. She knows the other story they tell, too. _Well,_ say the murmurs, _she was a green girl when she started. A good understanding, perhaps, but too little experience. He changed all that, of course._ Elizabeth sighs. She misses Rochester’s laughter more than anything. He raged often enough; her paints might have ended on the floor, with a challenge that she should show the scoffers how good a bare-faced actress she really is. Sometimes she wishes she had his gift for spite, that she might ask the ungracious-gracious ladies how, precisely, he is supposed to have accounted for the last decade of her fame, when he died before the start of it. And now even their Bess is gone.

Elizabeth Barry paints her face, and thinks of her sweet, willful daughter. Perhaps, after all, Rochester taught her one valuable thing: how to survive a tragedy. He had written her poetry dazzling in its extravagance, its irony directed only at himself:

Thou art my life—if thou but turn away  
My life’s a thousand deaths. Thou art my way—  
Without thee, Love, I travel not but stray.

And yet here she remains, clear-sighted and resolute despite having lost both him and her daughter. _Grief fills up the room of my absent child…_ She shivers a little. She sympathizes with Constance, and she admires her. Treated variously as a fool, a harridan, and an inconvenient supplicant, she nonetheless behaves as a queen. Mrs. Barry draws herself to her full height, and prepares to do the same.

* * *

Kate lies back into a nest of pillows, her legs around Mark’s waist and under a blanket. “The trouble is,” she says, “that no one knows who Constance _is._ I mean, I asked my cousin who’s doing the Ph.D. — you remember, you met her at Jo’s wedding — about medieval Brittany and she said she’d have to look it up. And casting directors? Forget it. As a line in the resumé, it’s meaningless.”

“It’s a nice, juicy part,” says Mark soothingly. “Casting directors will come on the PATH train and the Metro North and they’ll think you’re brilliant.”

Kate laughs, and reaches forward to pat vaguely at his back. “I love you.”

“Oddly specific reassurances provided gratis,” says Mark cheerfully.

“Mm.” Kate turns a page in her script. “I do _like _her,” she says. “And she gets introduced before she comes on, which is always a bonus. ‘How that ambitious Constance would not cease till she had kindled France and all the world upon the right and party of her son.’ And that’s Eleanor of Aquitaine speaking! If Eleanor of Aquitaine calls you ambitious…! I think,” continues Kate, “that we need to take that as an accurate assessment. Eleanor was a shrewd politician, and she knew not to underestimate her enemies.”__

“Will you break up with me if I say that Eleanor of Aquitaine is Katharine Hepburn in my head?”

"Never. Anyway,” says Kate, “I think we need to believe her. Which means that Constance is performing from the moment we meet her: the grateful mother, the grieving widow, the woman who is afraid of open conflict. But she’s performing those roles because she knows it’s what the men expect of her. With Eleanor, she’s savage.” 

“Mm,” says Mark. 

Kate smiles fondly at him, and returns to her script. She puts a sticky note that says ‘sarcasm; baby voice?’ next to Constance’s mockery of Eleanor. ‘Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig.’ Kate clicks her pen, and adds to the note: ‘sex joke, vulgar.’ She feels almost like a fellow-conspirator with Shakespeare, who created this face-off between an empress whom the world remembers and a duchess that the world forgot… and let the duchess win.

**Author's Note:**

> Ned Hawkins is a fictitious personage, despite the fact that we know who the [Chamberlain's Men](https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/stage/acting/chamberlainsmen.html) were. The performance of _King John_ in Rye is [hypothesized](https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/rye-chamberlains-accounts-payment-lord-chamberlains-players-20-shillings). Elizabeth Barry was not her generation's leading exponent of the role; apologies to Mrs. Siddons, but I thought the famous Mrs. Barry was more interesting. Kate is fictitious, and any resemblance to actors or acting students is almost wholly coincidental.


End file.
